Protecting Your Company & Customers From Cybercrime

Cybercrime is one of the biggest security threats facing small businesses today. As nationwide companies are being hacked however, it is becoming more and more apparent that businesses need to make cyber security a major concern. Here is how to protect your business from cybercrime.

One major way that you can keep your business and sensitive information safe is by encrypting your data. Filesystems, across-the-wire transfers and stored data are examples of all the things that should be encrypted. When you encrypt sensitive data, it makes it much harder for hackers to get ahold of information. In the long run, your business will be better for it. Another practice you should adopt in your business model is to secure your the websites that you use from man-in-the-middle attacks, or, MITM and malware infections. MITM attacks is when a third party connector secretly relays and sometimes even alters communication between two parties. Using SSL’s, or secure sockets layer, which creates encrypted links help to secure you from such attacks. Other things you can do is set the secure flag for all session cookies and to scan your website for malware daily. In addition, hackers change their techniques quickly, which is a reason it seems that so many security updates occur so often. While it may be easy to ignore these updates, it is vital that you continually keep your security system up to date. Updates usually include the latest security measures, especially against areas that may have been the most vulnerable to hackers.

While it is important to keep your business’ data secure so personal and sensitive information is not leaked, another reason you would want to avoid an attack is because of the financial cost. In fact, in 2014, the average cost of a data breach for on organization was $5.9 million. For a general data breach, it was an estimated cost of $201 per compromised record. For many, a small business simply cannot absorb this kind of loss. This is why it is important to make sure your business is secure security threats.